Luanne Rice (16 page)

Rose had
defied plenty of odds in her day, and today was no exception. By the time her
mother arrived, she had already been moved onto a pediatric surgical floor. She
was breathing well, and she’d lost five pounds of fluid, and her heart and
lungs and all her organs were going back to normal size. So why was it so hard
for her to even smile? Even a little smile seemed almost impossible.

“What’s
wrong, honey?” her mother asked, standing beside her bed.

“Nothing.”

“Are you
sure? You look upset.”

Rose tried
to make her lips turn up. It wasn’t a real smile—it didn’t come from inside.
But she didn’t want her mother to be worried. The doctors and therapists were
always telling her that her feelings were
fine,
and that she should
honor
them, even
when the feelings were unwanted: unhappy, sad, angry, hurt, things like that.
But the one thing Rose couldn’t bear was seeing her mother with those worry
lines in her forehead—so she faked a smile.

“Mom,” she
said. “Did you see Dr. Colvin?”

“Yes. He
told me you’re making great improvements. And I know he talked to Dr. Garibaldi
in Boston, to discuss how soon you can go there.”

“I don’t
want to go to Boston, Mom.”

“But,
honey—”

Rose
clenched her fists. The tips of her fingers were numb; they were always numb
because her heart didn’t pump enough blood fast enough. She had funny-looking
little fingertips, almost like tiny paddles. She tried to keep the pretend
smile on her face, but inside, she was melting.

“It’s
summer,” she said. “Jessica’s first summer in Cape Hawk. I’ve already been to
the hospital now. I knew I had to go, and I had it planned, but now this is it.
This is my hospital time. I want to have fun, Mom.
Fun with
Jessica.”

“I know,
sweetheart. And you will. That’s what the surgery is for—to replace the patch,
so you’ll be able to have all the fun in the world.”

Rose just
stared. She wanted to believe her mother. She had been in so many hospital beds
over the years. She remembered a time when she was five, and she’d had a valve
replacement, and developed endocarditis—a bacterial infection that attacks
people with heart problems. She spent months in the hospital, taking in
antibiotics through her veins, which practically ruined her kidneys and liver
and made her
hair
dry out. She had looked like a straw
doll.

“Jessica
will make a different best friend,” she said.

“No, she
won’t.”

“How do you
know?”

“Because
who could be a better best friend than you?”

“Someone who isn’t in the hospital.”

“Honey, why
are you so down?”

Rose took
some deep breaths, but it was getting harder to keep the smile on her face. How
could she not be down? Her birthday party had been so wonderful, magical—and then
Rose’s heart had given out. The drugs were stabilizing her now, but she felt
groggy all the time. And instead of getting to spend the summer in Cape Hawk,
now she was going to have to go to another hospital—the big one in Boston.
Jessica would probably just forget about her.

“That was a
pretty stupid question, right?” her mother asked.

“No,” Rose
said. “It wasn’t stupid. I’m sorry.”

“Rose,
never be sorry. You’ve been through so much, and we just keep asking you to go
through more and more. No wonder you’re—”

Her
mother’s voice was shaking, and she sounded so down herself that Rose thought
she was going to start to cry. But just then, looking over her mother’s
shoulder, she saw something framed in the doorway that brought a true smile to
her face—the first one she’d had all day.

Dr. Neill
stood in the doorway, holding a huge bunch of balloons.
Every
bright color, just like a rainbow.

“Dr.
Neill!” she said.

“Hi, Rose,”
he said, walking straight over to her, bending down to stroke her forehead.
“How’s my girl?”

“I’m glad
you’re here,” she said, almost unable to believe her eyes. Why hadn’t her
mother mentioned it?

“Of course
I’m here. You’re a wonder, Rose. I thought you were still in the ICU, but when
I asked at the desk, they told me you were here.”

“You’ve
been at the hospital since I got here?” Rose asked.

He nodded.
Rose gave her mother a surprised look, and her mother just stood there trying
to appear innocent.

“What about
Nanny, and all the other whales and sharks? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping
watch over them?”

“Nanny told
me this was more important.”

“Whales
don’t talk!”

“Well,
Nanny and I speak a certain language,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, to
people who don’t speak it
… .”

Rose
reached out. She touched his prothesis with one of her clubbed fingers. She
felt a spark inside.

“I think I
speak it too.”

“So do
I
,” he said.

“I’m
feeling left out,” her mother said.
“Herons, whales.
Could someone speak human to me?” Rose heard her, but this moment was
completely between her and Dr. Neill. She knew that he understood being in the
hospital, fearing that
she
might never get better,
that she’d always be different. She held up her index finger. He stared at it,
the way it broadened at the tip. She saw him look at the IV needle in the back
of her hand. She even saw him look at the catheter that ran from her to the bag
beside the bed, and she didn’t feel embarrassed. She wanted him to pick her up,
as if he were her father.

“I’m not
happy today,” she said.

“No,” he
said.

“I’m
scared.”

He nodded.
He crouched down by the side of her bed and looked into her eyes. The balloons
bobbed over his head. He tried to tie the strings to her bed rails, but he
couldn’t with one hand. Rose helped him out. Their fingers touched, and she
smiled. She was still scared, but having him there made her feel like smiling
anyway.

“You
brought me balloons,” she said.

“Yes, I
did.”

“I thought
balloons were bad. Because if you let go of the string, they might float out
over the ocean, and fall, and the sea turtles will think they’re jellyfish, and
eat them, and die.”

“You’re
right, Rose. You make a very good oceanographer. That’s why I knew it was safe
to give the balloons to you.”

“Because I care about the sea turtles?”

“Yes,” he
said, holding her hand.
“Because of that.”

Rose closed
her eyes and felt her pulse beating fast and light. She thought of how
everything had to be protected, in different ways. Her mother had to be
protected from worry; the sea turtles had to be protected from balloons; Rose
had to be protected from being so scared of what would happen next.

What did
Dr. Neill have to be protected from? She didn’t know. But she knew that there
had to be something, and she squeezed his hand to let him know that she was
there.

Chapter 15

T
he hot weather arrived in Cape Hawk, making it
seem more like the summers Jessica knew. Every morning, haze clung to the
cliffs and pines before burning off. Sunlight beat down, the breeze stopped
blowing. Jessica wore shorts over her bathing suit, but instead of going to the
swim cove, she was hard at work.

She held
the burlap bag in one hand, picked up fallen pine needles with the other. This
was messy work—her fingers were sticky with pitch, but she just pressed onward.
Bent at the waist, she made her way through her backyard, covering every inch.
She ignored fallen leaves or twigs, concentrating only on long needles fallen
from white pines.

Sometimes
she’d pass under a hemlock or spruce—trees with short needles. Those were fine
too, as long as they were pine. She found many pinecones—tiny ones that looked
like doll-size beehive ovens. The hemlock cones were perfect and compact, with
their petals drawn in tight like rosebuds. When she found them, she slipped
them into a different bag, slung over her shoulder. White-pine cones were
longer, with their tips frosted with silvery pitch. She ignored those.

As she
scoured her backyard and the lower fringe of the hilly woods behind her house,
she thought of Rose. What was she doing now? Was she getting better? Last night
one of the Nanouks had called her mother, and she’d heard them talking. The
report had been the same:
Rose is holding
her own
, which didn’t sound bad but definitely didn’t sound all that good,
either. Then, afterwards, Jessica had watched her mother go online, to the
Johns Hopkins site, and do some researchy thing with a worried crease in her
brow.

Jess tried
to tell herself that what the grownups thought didn’t matter. She was working
for Rose. Her back ached and fingers itched, but she didn’t care. Back in
Boston she had gone to Catholic school, and the nuns had told them about Saint
Agnes and Saint Agatha, as well as Joan of Arc: all young girls, martyrs, who
had suffered for the Lord.
Tales of hair shirts and beds of
nails and being beheaded.
Jessica had thought it sounded pretty lame at
first.
Especially hair shirts.
She couldn’t quite
imagine such a thing; was it like a fur coat, only a shirt?

But then
she had started thinking: maybe martyrdom could be a way to go—not beheading,
but the other things. A lot of the problems those old saints had had involved
demons. One Irish nun that kind of scared her, Sister
Ignatius,
had loved to tell them stories about the devil. “Lucifer is incarnate on this
earth,” she would say in her squeaky Wicklow accent. “He exists as surely as
you or I. We encounter him on a daily basis and must fight to banish him from
our lives!” Jessica believed Sister, and she began to think—if she was willing
to suffer, or sacrifice something, maybe she could drive Ted out of the house.

For the
first week, she tried giving up cinnamon Pop-Tarts. But Ted stayed and showed
no signs of budging. Jessica began doing other things: sacrificing pudding at
school lunch. Wearing shoes she had outgrown, that hurt her toes. Kneeling on
the bare wood floor until not only her knees ached, but also her hips and
spine. She didn’t have a bed of nails, but she tried sleeping in the bathtub
one night.

Her mother
found her and thought she had been sleepwalking. She took Jessica back to bed
very quickly—before Ted saw. Ted didn’t like anything unusual. He would have
somehow made Jessica sleeping in the bathtub seem like a slap in his face. He
might have yelled, or he might just have gone silent—with those cold, evil
eyes. Jessica could almost hear him hissing, “Why are you trying to hurt me
this way?”

So with the
bathtub off-limits and no bed of nails, Jessica had just changed her
sheets—from the soft pink ones with white lambs imprinted on the fabric to the
hard scratchy ones that her mother had bought by accident, on sale at Max-Mart.
They didn’t feel at all good on her skin. She also scratched her legs with
pins. It used to give her fierce pleasure to see little dots of blood on the
cheap sheets. Her mother just thought she’d been at her mosquito bites.

Jessica
would never know whether her martyrdom actually worked—it didn’t drive Ted from
their house. It didn’t save Tally. That was the night her mother decided they’d
had enough: when Ted kicked the little dog and killed her, her mother packed
them up in the dark of night, bundled them into the car, and drove them away.

Now,
picking up more pine needles, she paused in front of a flat rock where she had
seen a garter snake sunning itself last week. The serpent had opened its pink
mouth and hissed at her, and even though it was very small, its presence had
reminded Jessica of Ted, and shaken her.

Jessica
wished the snake would come now. She would step on it, barefoot, and kill it
like Mary. She wanted to drive the serpents and demons and evil wizards and Teds
out, so that Rose could get well. It was the only way. She walked slowly
through the pine woods, picking up more pine needles—her hand hot and sticky,
her back aching—and she saw a flash of blue in the trees.

At first
she thought it was Mary, leading her deeper into the woods, but then she looked
up in the branches of a spruce and saw that it was just a blue jay.
A bright, beautiful crested jay.
Not Mary at all.

When
Jessica had filled three large sacks, Marisa knew it was time to take her to
town. They drove down to the harbor, parked in front of In Stitches. Marisa was
glad to see that the door was ajar, the shop was open. For a moment she felt
excited—to think that Lily might be back, working. But when she and Jessica
went inside, she saw that it was Marlena behind the counter, with Cindy
restocking shelves.

“Hi,
girls,” Marlena called. “How are you?”

“We’re
fine,” Marisa said. “Have you heard from Lily?”

“Anne did.
She came down with coffee and muffins for us, and said that Rose is improving
quickly. She’s lost almost all the extra fluid, and they’re talking about
flying her down to Boston in a few days.”

“That’s a
good sign,” Marisa said.

“You’re a
nurse?” Cindy asked. “Anne was telling us.
A woman of
medicine in our ranks!”

“Yes, I
am,” Marisa said, and it felt good to think of the Nanouk Girls talking about
her, including her “in their ranks.”

“What do
you think it all means—all these complications?” Marlena asked.
“Poor Rosie, having to go through so much.”

“Tetralogy
of Fallot is very complicated,” she said, “but it’s treatable, especially when
the patient is young.”

“I’ve known
Lily since the year Rose was born,” Marlena said. “There hasn’t been a stretch
I can remember when she wasn’t taking her to some different hospital or
specialist.”

“Boston,
Melbourne, once out to Cincinnati,” Cindy said.

“Cincinnati
has the best pediatric heart center in the country,” Marisa said.

“I remember
that what they did there had to do with ‘transposition of the great vessels.’
My father was a boat captain, and I thought it had to do with shipping. But it
means that both Rose’s main arteries were on the left side of her heart,
instead of on either side,” Marlena said.

“That’s
right. Her aorta was misplaced,” Cindy said.

“What’s her
aorta?” Jessica asked, standing there with one of the sacks of pine needles.

“It’s the
large artery that pumps blood from the heart’s left ventricle and sends it out
into the body,” Marisa explained.

“And the
hospital lost it?” Jessica asked.

“No,
honey,” Cindy said. “It happened at birth.
Before birth, in
the womb.
No one knows why, but it was on the wrong side of her heart.”

“You mean,
God did that to her?” Jessica asked, sounding outraged.

Marisa felt
an aura, almost as if she was going to have a migraine. Only it wasn’t that—it
was Jessica about to go into a full-blown religious tirade. She watched her
daughter’s face turn red with outrage, and it reminded her of when Jessica
would react against Ted, against his control and anger. Instead of getting mad
at her, or even Ted, Jessica would get furious at God.

“Well, I
wouldn’t say he did it
to
her,”
Marlena said. “It’s more like in his infinite wisdom and
design,
he thought it made sense at the time. We don’t understand why.”

“What kind
of wisdom and design gives a misplaced artery to a baby?” Jess asked.

“Jessica,”
Marisa said warningly.

“I’m
serious. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“The Lord
isn’t supposed to make sense,” Marlena said, a little nervously. Marisa could
see that she was rethinking the two newest Nanouks.

“That’s
right,” Cindy said. “It’s one big mystery.
One big freaking
mystery.
Marlena, you might as well say he did it to her,” Cindy said.
“You sound all confused, and to tell you the truth, I’ve been confused myself.
Who can understand why this happened? To think of our Rosie suffering …”

“It does
pain me,” Marlena replied. “From the time she was a tiny blue baby …”

“Probably
it’s not the Lord who did it,” Jessica said. “Probably it was the devil.”

“Jess,
stop,” Marisa said, feeling the blood drain out of her face. When Jessica got
going on God, the devil, and Ted, anything could happen.

“The Lord
doesn’t hurt people,” Jessica said. “I refuse to believe that.”

Marisa
stared at her. She thought of all the sickness she’d seen in her day. The
injuries, illnesses, diseases, acts
of violence. Although
she had raised Jessica in the Church, she had been on a long, slow decline in
belief herself. It had reached its final depths during the end of her time with
Ted. “I do believe, help my unbelief,” had once been her prayer. Now she just
believed in science.

“God moves
in mysterious ways,” Marlena said. “But I’m with Jessica on this. I don’t think
God wants Rose or any of us to suffer. I’m going to bring this up the next time
the Nanouks are all in one place. I think we should put it in our charter.”

“Good
idea,” Cindy said, laughing. “We, the Nanouk Girls of the Frozen North, hereby
decree that the Lord is off the hook when it comes to pain and suffering.”

“I wouldn’t
go that far,” Marlena said defensively. “I just don’t think he does it on
purpose.”

“What’s
that lovely aroma?” Cindy asked, raising her eyebrow and changing the subject.
“It smells like the North Woods in here.”

“Pine
needles,” Jessica said.

“What are
they for?”

“Well, to
raise money for Rose’s medical care.”

“Heaven
knows Lily could use help with it,” Marlena said, “but how will pine needles
help?”

“I want to
make Cape Hawk pine pillows and sell them.”

Marisa
stood back, watching Jessica explain herself. This had been all her idea,
coming down to In Stitches, buying the materials from Lily’s shop—they had
known the Nanouk Girls were keeping it open, taking turns covering different
days.

“Where will you sell them, dear?”

“To the tourists who go on the whale boats.”

“Pine
pillows,” Cindy said.

Jessica
nodded. “They’ll smell just like Cape Hawk. All the things that make it so
special here—the woods, pine, birds, whales … I thought I could embroider
little pictures of Nanny, or the owls that live in the forest behind my house,
or the hawks that live on the rock ledges—right into the fabric, along with the
words ‘Cape Hawk,’ or maybe even ‘Get Well Soon, Rose.’ ”

“Do you do
a lot of embroidery, dear?” Marlena asked.

“I’ve never
done it before,” Jessica said proudly, chin jutting out. Clearly she didn’t see
this as a setback—just another feat to master. Marisa watched Marlena and Cindy
for their reactions. They both kept straight faces. What they didn’t know was
how determined Jessica could be, or how huge her heart was.

“It might
take you a while to learn,” Cindy said.